Personally, I'm wary of the first option's reference to roles for "private sector" and "civil society." I have a hard time not reading "private sector" as "Microsoft" and "civil society" as "political lobbyists."
Actually I'm more wary of government's role in the internet. Every war in existance has had at least two governments involved. Every tax in history was levied by a government. Every regulation in history was mandated by a government.
I can understand why you don't trust a business, but I cannot understand why you would think a government would be more trustworthy. Microsoft has no power over me, but my government has a hell of a lot. I use FreeBSD and KDE, and Microsoft can't do one damned thing about it! But if I don't want to pay my taxes, I get thrown in jail. I have a choice not to do business with Microsoft, but I have no choice but to do what my governement tell me to do.
The lobbyists are a problem, to be sure, but that's a problem that can be solved without having to hand over the reins of the internet to the exceedingly inefficient and corrupt UN.
I see two reasons. First, fewer women go into programming. The situation may be different today, but when I was in university, maybe only twenty percent of the CS students were female. I do not know why this is, but I suspect it's cultural.
The second reason, is that it's much rarer for a woman to be an unsocialized introvert. How many woman do you know who prefer to stay home on a saturday night hacking away on software in the dark?
Again, I don't know why any of these two reasons exist. But my observation tells me that they do.
Every software development company I've worked for has shown very little to no gender discrimination. I say "very little" because one had an HR guy that we had to fire over this very issue. But other than that, once the candidate reached engineering personnel in the interview process, no one cared what whether they had a penis or not.
p.s. It's not just computers, it's all of engineering. My company's hardware engineering department has *zero* females, compared to our smaller software department with five.
If I produce content, I should be able to decide what's done with it
Absolutely incorrect. That's what what copyright gives you. As an author you have the exclusive right to control copying and distribution, but you do not have the legal right (or even moral) to control usage.
I fully understand that artists disagree with the above, and that there has been a movement to get "artistic" rights enshrined into law, but there is no valid philosophical basis in it. My copy of your work is my property. If you didn't want me to fold, spindle and mutilate it, you should never have sold it to me in the first place.
Consider a book. You know, those old fashioned non-DRM things made of paper and ink. Anyway, if you buy a book the author does NOT get to tell you when you can read it. The ink doesn't magically disappear after you turn the last page. You yourself would be outraged if you bought a book that did this.
Copyright (and all other forms of intellectual property) are artificial rights that do not exist in nature. You aren't born with them, nor do you naturally aquire them though labor or trade. You ONLY exist because other rights have first been taken away from everyone else.
How would you like it if the money I paid for your "one-peek-per-customer" video had a "one-peek-per-vendor" DRM tag? You had better spend it fast or it's gone!
I used it until late 1998. At that point it became clear IBM had abandoned it for desktop users, so I switched to Linux and then to FreeBSD. A friend of mine didn't stop using it on his home desktop until 2001.
Second, the UN is ineffective because the US refuses to fund it.
An international world government is funded by a single member? WTF? That's like saying the local Chamber of Commerce is ineffective because Bob's Bargain Basement refuses to fund it.
which organization did we turn to when the huge tsunami happened in southeast asia?
World Vision? Seriously, private US citizens gave more to disaster relief than the UN did, and it got there sooner. That's not to blame Europe, however, because private European citizens gave more than the UN did too....you will get owned on this debate.
We need a minimum age for posting on Slashdot. Sheesh. Next thing you know he'll be going "neener neener."
Funny. My desktop environment integrates with any browser.
And what desktop is that? It sure as hell can't be Windows. Because I have to use Windows at work, and Firefox does NOT integrate with it. At least not in the manner Konqueror does.
Is there something wrong with having a choice of browsers? It doesn't matter what ftp client I use to access an ftp site. Except for some Microsoft-only mail servers, it doesn't matter which email client I use to get my email. Do I need to worry about which news reader I use to access usenet? No! But when it comes to http, suddenly I start seeing "Best Viewed With Another Browser" buttons. As if they're somehow proud of it. Stupid.
XMLHttpRequest() is important
The XMLHttpRequest isn't a web standard. To quote w3c: "The XMLHttpRequest object is not a W3C standard."
Google hasn't rejected you as a customer.
I'm not talking about google, I'm talking about those sites who have a product to sell but which require specific browsers. I don't have this problem with Amazon or any of the other major retailers. But I find it every so often with the same guys. Like yesterday trying to buy a piece of software from this guy, where the "checkout now" button wasn't even a link. Did I need flash loaded? Was he trying to do something too fancy in javascript? I have no idea, and I wasn't about to read through the page source to find out. I simply left instead.
And before you blame Konqueror on this, I was using Firefox at the time.
It is the Free Edge, and you're going to pay a price for it.
I know I pay a price for it. If I didn't want to pay the price then I would be just another good little sheep with Windows and Internet Explorer eating McDonalds hamburgers and laughing at Friends episodes and listening to Britney Spears. The price to be a clone is oh so small...
But that has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that most front end web "developers" aren't "developers". Consider the guy I mentioned above. Why should I have expected his shareware program to be in any way worthwhile when his webpage was such crap?
When I ran Linux as my primary, I had to give up things too, like playing movies.
First, I use FreeBSD instead of Linux. Second, I have no problems playing movies, either off of DVDs, or as quicktime/mpg/rp/etc files. Even within Konqueror if I wish.
The reasons for this are absurdly simple. So simple the pundits keep missing them in their zeal to declare Linux a failure.
1) Firefox is a one-click one-step install. Linux takes much more effort. This does not mean that Linux is a failure, it only means that installing *ANY* operating system is a pain in the butt. Linux will never get to a one-click install, but neither will any other operating system without being destructive to whatever was already on the system. Which leads to point two...
2) You don't have to give anything up to try out Firefox. You don't have to delete Internet Explorer first. You don't have to backup and repartition your harddrive to do it. It peacefully coexists within the same space as its competitors. Compare that to an operating system. This doesn't mean that Linux is a failure, because you're going to have the same problem installing Windows alongside an existing Linux.
Linux isn't taking off like Firefox because it's a failure, it isn't taking off because it's an operating system. Duh.
There's also the other side (progressive/vegan/environmentalist/neopagans) who trot out studies showing that we're all going to die unless we start voting Democrat or Green. No matter how wacky their positions, there's always a study to be found that will back it up.
When Firefox is fully and completely integrated into my desktop, I'll upgrade to it. Until then using it is a downgrade.
There may be features Google Maps needs that Konqueror doesn't have, but it's a huge stretch to say the same about GMail or Blogger. Sheesh, if you can make it work in ancient Internet Exploders, you can make it work in Konqueror and Safari!
Google has rejected me as a customer, so I feel justified in rejecting them as a vendor. I won't apologize about it either. Make a chipset that won't work on the number two Linux distro and you'll never hear the end of it, but write website that won't display on the number two Linux browser and you get praised for your business acumen. Go figure.
Google Maps, GMail and many Rails sites beg to differ.
Those are the exceptions. How many sites are comparable to those three? Not very many. And STILL Google Maps and GMail don't support my browser!
Err, uh.. GCC2.95 let you get away with a lot of stuff that GCC3 called you on. Same with GCC3->4. Anyone with a large legacy codebase felt what our shop felt.
In the grand scheme of things, gcc 2.95 is still a youngster. The word "legacy" is a misnomer. I know what you're trying to say, but it doesn't wash. "Getting away with a lot of stuff" is the fault of the programmer not the compiler. I helped port a million+ line code base from gcc 2.7 to 2.9 (not 2.95) not that long ago, and it only took about one man week to do, with only two bugs founds in SQA linked to the migration.
In other words, if you're experiencing pain migrating from 2.95 to 3.x, you're doing something wrong.
I'd strenuously object when someone says, "We only want IE support." It's just bad practice. But at the end of the day, it's their money to spend.
I keep hearing stories like this, but it still boggles my mind. Even though my current project is specified for Solaris, for example, I STILL keep it portable to other platforms. Are your customers *really* going to hold up payment because the site works in Firefox? Really? Don't mistake a non-requirement as a negative requirement.
Heck, I even snuck in a check with Konqueror.
Even if you're in a Windows-only shop, a Knoppix or Kubuntu live CD is free-as-in-beer-and-pretzels! There's no excuse not to test on Konqueror. In fact, because Konqueror does not code in workarounds for bad html, you'll actually find more bugs testing under Konqueror than under other browsers. Pop in the Kubuntu CD, reboot, and start testing!
There are no excuses for not testing under IE, FF, NS, Safari, Opera and Konqueror.
To me, your stance is every bit as stupid and smallminded as the stance of folks who ridiculed perl hackers back in the mid-ninties for "not being real programmers."
Actually, most perl hackers back in the early nineties weren't "real" programmers. Back then perl was treated as just a fancy awk. It took a while for them to figure out that perl was a real full blown language that they could do real stuff with. I have to maintain some of that early perl code, and most of it is just plain nasty. Whenever I get the chance I recode most of it in plain vanilla sh because that's all that was really needed....smug, self-satisfied people with your attitude.
As a Konqueror user, every day I encounter several sites that have the moral equivalent of "fuck you for not using internet explorer." If you want me to drop the attitude, stop calling those people "developers". If I did as a software developer what they did as web developers, I would be fired.
XML is not a programming language, so I fail to grasp your point. Markup languages (the "ML" in "XML") are not programming languages. I know people who can't tell the difference between integers and floating points but are able to write valid XHTML pages by hand.
Would it hurt you if I told you that it's probably a better language design than C++ and Java?
What? XML? Puh-leaze!
In case you were meaning "javascript", then it's possible you may be correct. But that's still irrelevant to a webpage, because the javascript there is 90% snippets stuck in the middle of markup. I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen a complete real world application written in javascript.
Imagine what a developer like you and I has to go through migrating a C++ project from GCC2.95 to GCC3.
Actually, that migration took me all of thirty seconds. If you have correct code for 2.95 it will build without problem on 3.x. The hard part is migrating 3.x code to 2.95. But even there if you use a subset of C++ you're still not going to run into problems.
If you're writing for Internet Explorer, then OF COURSE it won't work with Firefox, Safari or Opera! That's because you're not writing with a proper subset of the standard. You can't use the full standard, because not everyone supports it, but you can write to a subset of the standard and have everyone support it. You might not be able to do flash-happy pages this way, but that won't stop you from delivering actual usable content.
I assume you mean the HTML, CSS and JavaScript?
No, I mean testing as in "it's been tested on the browser I use". All too many of you web developers think that if you've tested on Internet Explorer then you're done. A few of your more enlightened peers will even test on Firefox. But hardly any of you test on Opera, Safari, Konqueror, any of the various PDA/phone browers, Lynx, Links, etc.
How the hell are you supposed to automate testing of HTML layouts?
You can't. But don't use that as an excuse to do no testing at all. Roll up your sleeves and test it your damned self!
I don't know, what are you? Your list doesn't include any programming languages. Javascript is close, but surely you can do better. Even Visual Basic qualifies. XSLT does not.
But I will admit you're much much closer to being a developer than the average "ooh it has flash!" front end guys.
I read the whole review. I'm still unclear on what it's about. It must be some topic too rarified and refined for a lowly software developer like me. Must be rocket science.
Why is it that amongst web developers there is only considered to be 'one way to do things'.
Maybe it's because they're not really developers? They like to pretend they are, but they're not. Writing javascript no more makes them developers than writing shell scripts would. And of course, HTML and CSS are *NOT* programming languages!
Real developers test their code. Web "developers" do not. At best they'll make sure their pages work with Internet Explorer and Firefox. As if those are the only two browsers in the world. Test on last years Firefox? Hah! Don't make me laugh!
The people working on the back end database and CGI interfaces might be developers, but those who write the HTML/CSS are not. Yes, there are some exception, but that only validates the rule.
A police officer makes a search of Hannibal Lector's house, and discovers a freezer full of prime cuts from former philharmonic orchestra members. Hannibal is then arrested and a court trial ensues. Unfortunately, it turns out that the search was illegal because there was no warrant and no probable cause. Do we let Hannibal go free?
Of course not!
Illegally obtained evidence is still evidence. The solution is not to through it out, but to punish the police officer who made the illegal search. That's actually how the system used to work. You don't let the known serial killer go free, you instead arrest the cop.
If this current lawsuit fails, I guarantee you won't hear about in any mainstream or semi-mainstream press. It might be reported on Slashdot if it's a slow news day, but not on the front page.
I generally agree with you on legal reform. The system is far from perfect, but it can be fixed without having to completely refactor the system.
Not just the American justice system, but also that of many other nations. Think of the German justice system, which allows third parties to sue first parties for perceived damages to second parties. It was there that "Mobilix" linux was sued as infringing on the trademark of "Asterix" the comic books.
Millions of people disagree with me about Windows and McDonalds as well. I don't drink Coors or Budweiser either, nor do I listen to the currently popular music.
I'm not at all ashamed that I don't use the "Britney Spears" of roleplaying games...
If you actually talk to Alan Greenspan, he will say otherwise. There is no evidence that a decentralized banking system would be worse than the government mandated federal reserve monopoly.
That you're even doubting the effect of government on the economy indicates you don't understand economics. If you tax consumption you get less consumption. If you tax production you get less production. Even if you find the fairest possible tax, you'll still taking money out of the economy. Even if you manage to hire the most brilliant people in the world to reallocate your tax monies, you still have a bureacratic sink. You get the same problem with regulation. Anytime you make people do what they would not normally do voluntarily, you create a sink on the economy.
This doesn't imply that anarcho-capitalism is the way to do. Far far from it. There are legitimate purposes to government. But being the sole economic actor in an autocratic system is not one of them. Just because SimCity lets you be a totalitarian dictator with the power of indiscriminate eminent domain and seizure, doesn't mean that it makes sense in real life, anymore than GTA:SA provides a working model for social interaction.
If you're going to do systems level programming in Unix, this book is a must! Whether or not you would benefit from it elsewise depends on how much the frameworks you use insulate you from the gory details of libc and system calls.
Geez. Even the hint of a suggestion that the economy consists of an aggregate of private voluntary transactions brings the pro-interventionist forces out of the woodwork.
Government certainly has a role in the economy. It can ensure a "level playing field", uniform laws, system of arbitration enforcement, etc. I wasn't arguing otherwise. But that doesn't imply that they should be an active participant in the economy. Every mainstream economics text affirms that government interference in the economy has a negative effect. That's because economics is based on voluntary action, and injecting coercive government actions into the mix hinders that.
There may be *social* reasons to have government economic intervention, but there are few economic reasons beyond the their role as keepers of the peace. For example, taxation has a negative effect on the economy, which only a numbskull would deny. But that does not deny any non-economic benefits a particular tax may have to society as a whole.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I'm wary of the first option's reference to roles for "private sector" and "civil society." I have a hard time not reading "private sector" as "Microsoft" and "civil society" as "political lobbyists."
Actually I'm more wary of government's role in the internet. Every war in existance has had at least two governments involved. Every tax in history was levied by a government. Every regulation in history was mandated by a government.
I can understand why you don't trust a business, but I cannot understand why you would think a government would be more trustworthy. Microsoft has no power over me, but my government has a hell of a lot. I use FreeBSD and KDE, and Microsoft can't do one damned thing about it! But if I don't want to pay my taxes, I get thrown in jail. I have a choice not to do business with Microsoft, but I have no choice but to do what my governement tell me to do.
The lobbyists are a problem, to be sure, but that's a problem that can be solved without having to hand over the reins of the internet to the exceedingly inefficient and corrupt UN.
I see two reasons. First, fewer women go into programming. The situation may be different today, but when I was in university, maybe only twenty percent of the CS students were female. I do not know why this is, but I suspect it's cultural.
The second reason, is that it's much rarer for a woman to be an unsocialized introvert. How many woman do you know who prefer to stay home on a saturday night hacking away on software in the dark?
Again, I don't know why any of these two reasons exist. But my observation tells me that they do.
Every software development company I've worked for has shown very little to no gender discrimination. I say "very little" because one had an HR guy that we had to fire over this very issue. But other than that, once the candidate reached engineering personnel in the interview process, no one cared what whether they had a penis or not.
p.s. It's not just computers, it's all of engineering. My company's hardware engineering department has *zero* females, compared to our smaller software department with five.
What does a Microsoft certification have to do with programming?
If I produce content, I should be able to decide what's done with it
Absolutely incorrect. That's what what copyright gives you. As an author you have the exclusive right to control copying and distribution, but you do not have the legal right (or even moral) to control usage.
I fully understand that artists disagree with the above, and that there has been a movement to get "artistic" rights enshrined into law, but there is no valid philosophical basis in it. My copy of your work is my property. If you didn't want me to fold, spindle and mutilate it, you should never have sold it to me in the first place.
Consider a book. You know, those old fashioned non-DRM things made of paper and ink. Anyway, if you buy a book the author does NOT get to tell you when you can read it. The ink doesn't magically disappear after you turn the last page. You yourself would be outraged if you bought a book that did this.
Copyright (and all other forms of intellectual property) are artificial rights that do not exist in nature. You aren't born with them, nor do you naturally aquire them though labor or trade. You ONLY exist because other rights have first been taken away from everyone else.
How would you like it if the money I paid for your "one-peek-per-customer" video had a "one-peek-per-vendor" DRM tag? You had better spend it fast or it's gone!
I used it until late 1998. At that point it became clear IBM had abandoned it for desktop users, so I switched to Linux and then to FreeBSD. A friend of mine didn't stop using it on his home desktop until 2001.
Have you READ that document? Don't get sucked into thinking it's good jsut because it has a fancy title or a few good quotable soundbites within.
Hang on, I just read some of johnelin's back posts. This is the guy who thought last December's tsunami was caused by global warming!
Second, the UN is ineffective because the US refuses to fund it.
...you will get owned on this debate.
An international world government is funded by a single member? WTF? That's like saying the local Chamber of Commerce is ineffective because Bob's Bargain Basement refuses to fund it.
which organization did we turn to when the huge tsunami happened in southeast asia?
World Vision? Seriously, private US citizens gave more to disaster relief than the UN did, and it got there sooner. That's not to blame Europe, however, because private European citizens gave more than the UN did too.
We need a minimum age for posting on Slashdot. Sheesh. Next thing you know he'll be going "neener neener."
Funny. My desktop environment integrates with any browser.
And what desktop is that? It sure as hell can't be Windows. Because I have to use Windows at work, and Firefox does NOT integrate with it. At least not in the manner Konqueror does.
Is there something wrong with having a choice of browsers? It doesn't matter what ftp client I use to access an ftp site. Except for some Microsoft-only mail servers, it doesn't matter which email client I use to get my email. Do I need to worry about which news reader I use to access usenet? No! But when it comes to http, suddenly I start seeing "Best Viewed With Another Browser" buttons. As if they're somehow proud of it. Stupid.
XMLHttpRequest() is important
The XMLHttpRequest isn't a web standard. To quote w3c: "The XMLHttpRequest object is not a W3C standard."
Google hasn't rejected you as a customer.
I'm not talking about google, I'm talking about those sites who have a product to sell but which require specific browsers. I don't have this problem with Amazon or any of the other major retailers. But I find it every so often with the same guys. Like yesterday trying to buy a piece of software from this guy, where the "checkout now" button wasn't even a link. Did I need flash loaded? Was he trying to do something too fancy in javascript? I have no idea, and I wasn't about to read through the page source to find out. I simply left instead.
And before you blame Konqueror on this, I was using Firefox at the time.
It is the Free Edge, and you're going to pay a price for it.
I know I pay a price for it. If I didn't want to pay the price then I would be just another good little sheep with Windows and Internet Explorer eating McDonalds hamburgers and laughing at Friends episodes and listening to Britney Spears. The price to be a clone is oh so small...
But that has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that most front end web "developers" aren't "developers". Consider the guy I mentioned above. Why should I have expected his shareware program to be in any way worthwhile when his webpage was such crap?
When I ran Linux as my primary, I had to give up things too, like playing movies.
First, I use FreeBSD instead of Linux. Second, I have no problems playing movies, either off of DVDs, or as quicktime/mpg/rp/etc files. Even within Konqueror if I wish.
Yes, I understand your point. I understood it the first time. I was merely pointing out that the religious right doesn't have a monopoly on this.
The reasons for this are absurdly simple. So simple the pundits keep missing them in their zeal to declare Linux a failure.
1) Firefox is a one-click one-step install. Linux takes much more effort. This does not mean that Linux is a failure, it only means that installing *ANY* operating system is a pain in the butt. Linux will never get to a one-click install, but neither will any other operating system without being destructive to whatever was already on the system. Which leads to point two...
2) You don't have to give anything up to try out Firefox. You don't have to delete Internet Explorer first. You don't have to backup and repartition your harddrive to do it. It peacefully coexists within the same space as its competitors. Compare that to an operating system. This doesn't mean that Linux is a failure, because you're going to have the same problem installing Windows alongside an existing Linux.
Linux isn't taking off like Firefox because it's a failure, it isn't taking off because it's an operating system. Duh.
There's also the other side (progressive/vegan/environmentalist/neopagans) who trot out studies showing that we're all going to die unless we start voting Democrat or Green. No matter how wacky their positions, there's always a study to be found that will back it up.
When Firefox is fully and completely integrated into my desktop, I'll upgrade to it. Until then using it is a downgrade.
There may be features Google Maps needs that Konqueror doesn't have, but it's a huge stretch to say the same about GMail or Blogger. Sheesh, if you can make it work in ancient Internet Exploders, you can make it work in Konqueror and Safari!
Google has rejected me as a customer, so I feel justified in rejecting them as a vendor. I won't apologize about it either. Make a chipset that won't work on the number two Linux distro and you'll never hear the end of it, but write website that won't display on the number two Linux browser and you get praised for your business acumen. Go figure.
Google Maps, GMail and many Rails sites beg to differ.
...smug, self-satisfied people with your attitude.
Those are the exceptions. How many sites are comparable to those three? Not very many. And STILL Google Maps and GMail don't support my browser!
Err, uh.. GCC2.95 let you get away with a lot of stuff that GCC3 called you on. Same with GCC3->4. Anyone with a large legacy codebase felt what our shop felt.
In the grand scheme of things, gcc 2.95 is still a youngster. The word "legacy" is a misnomer. I know what you're trying to say, but it doesn't wash. "Getting away with a lot of stuff" is the fault of the programmer not the compiler. I helped port a million+ line code base from gcc 2.7 to 2.9 (not 2.95) not that long ago, and it only took about one man week to do, with only two bugs founds in SQA linked to the migration.
In other words, if you're experiencing pain migrating from 2.95 to 3.x, you're doing something wrong.
I'd strenuously object when someone says, "We only want IE support." It's just bad practice. But at the end of the day, it's their money to spend.
I keep hearing stories like this, but it still boggles my mind. Even though my current project is specified for Solaris, for example, I STILL keep it portable to other platforms. Are your customers *really* going to hold up payment because the site works in Firefox? Really? Don't mistake a non-requirement as a negative requirement.
Heck, I even snuck in a check with Konqueror.
Even if you're in a Windows-only shop, a Knoppix or Kubuntu live CD is free-as-in-beer-and-pretzels! There's no excuse not to test on Konqueror. In fact, because Konqueror does not code in workarounds for bad html, you'll actually find more bugs testing under Konqueror than under other browsers. Pop in the Kubuntu CD, reboot, and start testing!
There are no excuses for not testing under IE, FF, NS, Safari, Opera and Konqueror.
To me, your stance is every bit as stupid and smallminded as the stance of folks who ridiculed perl hackers back in the mid-ninties for "not being real programmers."
Actually, most perl hackers back in the early nineties weren't "real" programmers. Back then perl was treated as just a fancy awk. It took a while for them to figure out that perl was a real full blown language that they could do real stuff with. I have to maintain some of that early perl code, and most of it is just plain nasty. Whenever I get the chance I recode most of it in plain vanilla sh because that's all that was really needed.
As a Konqueror user, every day I encounter several sites that have the moral equivalent of "fuck you for not using internet explorer." If you want me to drop the attitude, stop calling those people "developers". If I did as a software developer what they did as web developers, I would be fired.
And XHTML is just XML by another name.
XML is not a programming language, so I fail to grasp your point. Markup languages (the "ML" in "XML") are not programming languages. I know people who can't tell the difference between integers and floating points but are able to write valid XHTML pages by hand.
Would it hurt you if I told you that it's probably a better language design than C++ and Java?
What? XML? Puh-leaze!
In case you were meaning "javascript", then it's possible you may be correct. But that's still irrelevant to a webpage, because the javascript there is 90% snippets stuck in the middle of markup. I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen a complete real world application written in javascript.
Imagine what a developer like you and I has to go through migrating a C++ project from GCC2.95 to GCC3.
Actually, that migration took me all of thirty seconds. If you have correct code for 2.95 it will build without problem on 3.x. The hard part is migrating 3.x code to 2.95. But even there if you use a subset of C++ you're still not going to run into problems.
If you're writing for Internet Explorer, then OF COURSE it won't work with Firefox, Safari or Opera! That's because you're not writing with a proper subset of the standard. You can't use the full standard, because not everyone supports it, but you can write to a subset of the standard and have everyone support it. You might not be able to do flash-happy pages this way, but that won't stop you from delivering actual usable content.
I assume you mean the HTML, CSS and JavaScript?
No, I mean testing as in "it's been tested on the browser I use". All too many of you web developers think that if you've tested on Internet Explorer then you're done. A few of your more enlightened peers will even test on Firefox. But hardly any of you test on Opera, Safari, Konqueror, any of the various PDA/phone browers, Lynx, Links, etc.
How the hell are you supposed to automate testing of HTML layouts?
You can't. But don't use that as an excuse to do no testing at all. Roll up your sleeves and test it your damned self!
I don't know, what are you? Your list doesn't include any programming languages. Javascript is close, but surely you can do better. Even Visual Basic qualifies. XSLT does not.
But I will admit you're much much closer to being a developer than the average "ooh it has flash!" front end guys.
I read the whole review. I'm still unclear on what it's about. It must be some topic too rarified and refined for a lowly software developer like me. Must be rocket science.
Why is it that amongst web developers there is only considered to be 'one way to do things'.
Maybe it's because they're not really developers? They like to pretend they are, but they're not. Writing javascript no more makes them developers than writing shell scripts would. And of course, HTML and CSS are *NOT* programming languages!
Real developers test their code. Web "developers" do not. At best they'll make sure their pages work with Internet Explorer and Firefox. As if those are the only two browsers in the world. Test on last years Firefox? Hah! Don't make me laugh!
The people working on the back end database and CGI interfaces might be developers, but those who write the HTML/CSS are not. Yes, there are some exception, but that only validates the rule.
A police officer makes a search of Hannibal Lector's house, and discovers a freezer full of prime cuts from former philharmonic orchestra members. Hannibal is then arrested and a court trial ensues. Unfortunately, it turns out that the search was illegal because there was no warrant and no probable cause. Do we let Hannibal go free?
Of course not!
Illegally obtained evidence is still evidence. The solution is not to through it out, but to punish the police officer who made the illegal search. That's actually how the system used to work. You don't let the known serial killer go free, you instead arrest the cop.
Defendent wins stupid lawsuit
If this current lawsuit fails, I guarantee you won't hear about in any mainstream or semi-mainstream press. It might be reported on Slashdot if it's a slow news day, but not on the front page.
I generally agree with you on legal reform. The system is far from perfect, but it can be fixed without having to completely refactor the system.
Not just the American justice system, but also that of many other nations. Think of the German justice system, which allows third parties to sue first parties for perceived damages to second parties. It was there that "Mobilix" linux was sued as infringing on the trademark of "Asterix" the comic books.
Millions of people disagree with me about Windows and McDonalds as well. I don't drink Coors or Budweiser either, nor do I listen to the currently popular music.
I'm not at all ashamed that I don't use the "Britney Spears" of roleplaying games...
If you actually talk to Alan Greenspan, he will say otherwise. There is no evidence that a decentralized banking system would be worse than the government mandated federal reserve monopoly.
That you're even doubting the effect of government on the economy indicates you don't understand economics. If you tax consumption you get less consumption. If you tax production you get less production. Even if you find the fairest possible tax, you'll still taking money out of the economy. Even if you manage to hire the most brilliant people in the world to reallocate your tax monies, you still have a bureacratic sink. You get the same problem with regulation. Anytime you make people do what they would not normally do voluntarily, you create a sink on the economy.
This doesn't imply that anarcho-capitalism is the way to do. Far far from it. There are legitimate purposes to government. But being the sole economic actor in an autocratic system is not one of them. Just because SimCity lets you be a totalitarian dictator with the power of indiscriminate eminent domain and seizure, doesn't mean that it makes sense in real life, anymore than GTA:SA provides a working model for social interaction.
If you're going to do systems level programming in Unix, this book is a must! Whether or not you would benefit from it elsewise depends on how much the frameworks you use insulate you from the gory details of libc and system calls.
Geez. Even the hint of a suggestion that the economy consists of an aggregate of private voluntary transactions brings the pro-interventionist forces out of the woodwork.
Government certainly has a role in the economy. It can ensure a "level playing field", uniform laws, system of arbitration enforcement, etc. I wasn't arguing otherwise. But that doesn't imply that they should be an active participant in the economy. Every mainstream economics text affirms that government interference in the economy has a negative effect. That's because economics is based on voluntary action, and injecting coercive government actions into the mix hinders that.
There may be *social* reasons to have government economic intervention, but there are few economic reasons beyond the their role as keepers of the peace. For example, taxation has a negative effect on the economy, which only a numbskull would deny. But that does not deny any non-economic benefits a particular tax may have to society as a whole.